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Tuesday, March 09, 2021
Ask These Questions at Your Next Job Interview
lifehacker.com: Interviews are a two-way street. As much as the interviewer is taking a microscope to you and your skills, you’re analyzing whether the company is genuinely the right fit for you. Asking questions during your interview helps you understand the company culture and is key to a successful interview.
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3 comments:
I think that a lot of new college graduates are just looking to get the job, and egare to start that why may not look deeper into a company. I have found myself in many positions (not just in jobs but in any type of relationship) that I can be to trust worthy or assume that the oppurtunity that I am getting into is the right fit. It is imporatnt to be eager and ready to jump into a position, but is it going to pay off in the long term? Sometimes the job discriptions seem amazing, at a glacne the company and team you are applying for seem like they will help you accomplish your career goals, but you have to be in it for the long haul. Getting the job is one thing (its not that hard to have a goo interview) but the harder part is to find a job that will benifit both the company and yourself. Asking questions is a major part of the interveiw process. On a resume, no emypolyer is going to praise you for the amount of jobs you've been offered. They want to see that you had kept the job and that it is the right fit for you.
These are great questions, and the article does a great job of reframing job interviews as a dialogue between the candidate and the interviewer. I feel like there is a perceived power imbalance between the company and the candidate and in a lot of cases there is. Retail stores probably don’t care about finding the “right fit” for the cashier position and have plenty of people to chose from. However, for more permanent positions that people can make their careers, (good) companies make a genuine effort to find the right candidate. That means they are trying to impress you just as much as you are trying to impress them, and you are offering them everything you bring to the table. This is even more true in smaller industries with niche positions for which there are not that many qualified candidates. This article makes it seem like the point of asking questions is to impress the interviewer, but it is important to also ask questions you genuinely want the answers to, even if they aren’t the “best” questions to ask.
This article makes some good points about the reasons for asking questions at a job interview because historically, I’ve thought that the questions issue in interviews is dumb. My first interaction with asking questions was when I was putting together my resume for CMU with an alum who went to my high school. He said I should both have questions prepared as well as be prepared to answer questions about myself including things unrelated to theater. It always seems to me that asking questions about your future employer at the interview is too early in the process because I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know. That being said, I’m appreciative of the suggestions of both specific questions as well as types of questions and important things to ask about and why which is the sort of information that would have been nice to know before applying to CMU specifically.
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